In August 1966, an almost unbelievable scene took place on the streets of Licun in Qingdao.
A group of Red Guards beat gongs and drums and shouted slogans including “Down with the founding patriarch of China’s royalists,” carrying a skull with white hair still attached through the streets. The skull belonged to Kang Youwei, who had died 39 years earlier. This political figure, who in the late Qing had called for reform and tried to save China through institutional change, was dug out of his grave nearly four decades after his death and made a principal target of criticism in the campaign to “Destroy the Four Olds.”
Kang Youwei’s political positions were certainly a matter of controversy. But the Chinese hold that the dead are to be treated with the highest respect, and turning a dead man’s remains into a political prop was one of the most absurd and cruel scenes of the Cultural Revolution.
From leader of reform to “royalist”
Kang Youwei was born in 1858 in Nanhai, Guangdong province, and passed the highest imperial examination in 1895. After the First Sino-Japanese War he joined with candidates who had come to the capital for the examinations in submitting a petition to the court, opposing the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki and calling for rejection of the peace terms, the moving of the capital and institutional reform. The episode is known in history as the Gongche Shangshu, the petition of the examination candidates. He went on to submit repeated memorials to the Guangxu Emperor, advocating reform of the official system, the development of industry and commerce, and the founding of new-style schools, hoping to use imperial authority to drive reform from the top down and move China toward a constitutional monarchy. In 1898 the Hundred Days’ Reform began.
The reform was quickly crushed by conservative forces led by the Empress Dowager Cixi. The Guangxu Emperor was imprisoned, six men including Tan Sitong and Kang Guangren were executed, and Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao fled abroad. In 1899, Kang Youwei founded in Canada the Society to Protect and Save the Great Qing Emperor, known for short as the Baohuang Hui or Protect the Emperor Society, hoping to rescue the Guangxu Emperor and revive the reform cause.
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What Kang Youwei wanted to protect was the Guangxu Emperor, who supported reform, and his ultimate goal remained a constitutional monarchy. After the 1911 revolution, however, he continued to oppose a republic, and in 1917 he took part in Zhang Xun’s attempt to restore the monarchy. After that attempt failed, his place in history shifted gradually from leader of reform to representative of the royalists. Even his student Liang Qichao opposed him publicly, leaving on record the line, “I cannot join my teacher in becoming a criminal against the nation.”
Kang Youwei was both an advocate of modern reform and a royalist figure after the founding of the republic. That complex and contradictory political record should properly have been left to historical research and public discussion to judge. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, though, the first half of his life had been deliberately erased, and only the label “royalist” remained.
Later years in Qingdao and the grave on Zao’er Mountain
In his later years Kang Youwei lived for a long period in Qingdao, and he chose a piece of hillside near Licun as the site of his grave. The hill was covered with jujube trees and was known as Zao’er Mountain, or Jujube Mountain, and also went by the name Xiang’er Mountain. Kang Youwei died in Qingdao on March 31, 1927, at the age of 69, and his body was later buried there.
The grave faced west with its back to the east. A wall was built behind it following the contour of the hill, and a stone wall enclosed the burial mound. Before the grave stood a stone tablet reading “Tomb of Mr. Kang of Nanhai,” and above the entrance to the tomb were carved four characters meaning “master of national learning.” Who could have imagined that 39 years later it would become a place for a group of middle school students to vent their “revolutionary fervor.”
In the summer of 1966 the Cultural Revolution was launched in full. On June 1, the People’s Daily published “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons,” calling for a fierce assault on what it termed bourgeois ideology and culture. On June 5 it published “Be a Proletarian Revolutionary or a Bourgeois Royalist?”, casting “royalists” as political enemies the revolutionary masses had to bring down.
In August the Red Guard movement spread rapidly and the campaign to “Destroy the Four Olds” swept the country. The “Four Olds” meant old thinking, old culture, old customs and old habits. Large numbers of temples, ancestral halls, historic sites, memorial arches, graves, paintings, calligraphy and ancient books were smashed and burned, and many historical figures and their descendants came under attack because of their origins and political labels. The People’s Daily declared publicly at the time that the Cultural Revolution was to bring about the wholesale destruction of all the old thinking, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes (People’s Daily, Aug. 29, 1966, front page).
In that atmosphere, historical figures were reclassified as either “revolutionary” or “counter-revolutionary.” Kang Youwei’s record as a leader of reform was ignored, while his part in the attempted restoration was magnified without limit. He was reduced to “China’s greatest royalist,” and even his grave was regarded as one of the “Four Olds” that had to be destroyed.
According to the later recollection of Lin Zhiye, who was then teaching at Qingdao No. 5 Middle School, in August 1966 some teachers and students at the school, now Qingdao No. 58 Middle School, first turned their attention to the Xiangu Pagoda at Yujiaxiahe. They brought the thick ropes used for tug of war and tried to pull the old pagoda down, without success.
Having failed to destroy the pagoda, someone, “blood boiling,” proposed that they go and dig up Kang Youwei’s grave. The group set off for Zao’er Mountain carrying picks and shovels.
On reaching the grave they first knocked over the stone tablet reading “Tomb of Mr. Kang of Nanhai,” then swung their picks and shovels and began digging into the burial mound. Because the mound had been built up from a great deal of rubble and earth and was extremely solid, the group dug all morning before getting close to the stone door of the tomb chamber. Once the stone door had been smashed open, the chamber was exposed.
According to Lin Zhiye’s recollection, the coffin had already collapsed and the clothing on Kang Youwei’s body had decayed. The Red Guards broke up the coffin and dragged out the remains. Some of the bones were scattered or burned, and the skull was taken back to the school.
The next day they tied the skull, with its white hair, to a wooden pole and paraded it through the streets of Licun to the beating of gongs and drums. Some shouted “Down with the founding patriarch of China’s royalists.” Some accounts also record that the skull had been given a label along the lines of “the head of Kang Youwei, China’s greatest royalist.”
What Kang Youwei had actually argued for, and what the reform of 1898 had meant, were by then of no interest to anyone. The Red Guards needed only an enemy who could be publicly humiliated. Even though that “enemy” had been dead for close to 40 years, he was to be dragged out of his grave and put through one more political trial.
That part of Kang Youwei’s remains survived at all is directly owing to Wang Jiqin, a researcher at the Qingdao Municipal Museum.
At the time, Qingdao was staging an exhibition under the slogan “To rebel is justified.” When Wang Jiqin learned that the skull had been dug up, he did not try to stop the Red Guards openly, because anyone who spoke up for a “royalist” risked being denounced as a royalist’s filial son and worthy grandson.
He took an indirect approach instead, proposing that the skull be sent to the museum as a physical exhibit for the “To rebel is justified” show. The reasoning fitted the political language of the time, and the Red Guards agreed.
After the exhibition closed, Wang Jiqin found a wooden box, placed the skull and some of the other relics inside, nailed the lid down and kept it in secret. Using the exhibition as his pretext, he gave this salvaged remnant one last layer of protection.
It stayed hidden for more than a decade. Only in 1984, when the relevant authorities in Qingdao set about rebuilding Kang Youwei’s grave and looking for the surviving remains, did he hand the box over. After the contents were checked, the skull and the relics were placed in the care of the cultural relics administration.
After the Cultural Revolution ended, the Qingdao municipal government planned to restore Kang Youwei’s grave. But the setting around the original grave on Zao’er Mountain had already changed and was no longer suitable for a restoration in the original form. With the agreement of Kang Youwei’s descendants, the authorities chose a new site on the southern slope of Fushan, in the hills north of Damaidao.
In 1985 the remains of Kang Youwei that had survived the ordeal were formally reinterred in the new grave. The burial ground rests against the hills and faces the sea, and a new tablet stands before the grave. The inscription and the epitaph were written by Liu Haisu, a painter and calligrapher who had once studied under Kang Youwei. Qingdao local media record that Liu Haisu’s epitaph includes the lines, “The gentleman was born by the South Sea and returned to the Yellow Sea; I followed him at Shanghai, and I inscribe him across the vast sea; his writings and his achievements shine for a thousand years.”
In 1992 Kang Youwei’s grave was listed as a protected cultural site of Shandong province. The original grave site on Zao’er Mountain was later repaired as well and became a protected cultural site of the city of Qingdao. A grave that had once been smashed as one of the “Four Olds” came in the end to be protected as a cultural relic.
Later generations are perfectly entitled to criticize Kang Youwei’s political choices, and ought to assess them fully on the basis of the historical record. But digging open his grave, scattering his bones and tying his skull to a pole to be paraded through the streets was a wholesale assault, in the name of politics, on human dignity, on cultural heritage and on social ethics.
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